envy

I never know what to put as the title for each thing I type. The box should be under this one, because thoughts just seem to be dammed up, only ready to flow after I can make a hole and have it burst.

I'm looking at a rainbow light streaking across our television. It is violet, blue, green and yellow. If you move your head left or right the colours continue and repeat. It is endless, until your eye and your television are in line with each other and you can't be sure what you are seeing at all anymore.

There are bluebells in a vase on my windowsill. I picked them on May Day at Glasgow Necropolis with Stuart. It felt like how a May Day should be, like in a book. I'm always wanting to be so romantic and at one with the world, but my world keeps inhibiting such actions and the realism of others threatens to bring me back down to earth forever. The bluebells looked so beautiful. A carpet of them, but not all blue. Some deep blue, some pale violet and lavender, some altogether white. In Rebecca Maxim says he believes bluebells shouldn't be picked as they look worse in a vase. I thought this as I stooped down to pick them, feet crackling on the emaciated, crumpled leaves of last autumn, but I picked them all the same. I wanted them near to me, so I could safely rest my head in the clouds once more. They still smell beautiful, but they are slightly listless and lank. I couldn't make an arrangement out of them, they wouldn't allow. They hang horizontally.

People make me world weary. Sometimes I think people only exist to make other people feel worse about their lives. Sometimes people want to pick you apart just because they can, and sometimes they do it because they are jealous. A lot of people have been saying to me things such as 'how do you manage to be such a domestic godess?' or 'did you make that?' or 'where do you get the time to do all this stuff' and I reply in turn. Oh it's nothing, not important, I'm a student I have too much free time. I smile bashfully. You would think to be pleased by people's approval and admiration but it's really not that. It's jealousy. And it's scorn, feelings of anger and resentment generated by thier own awareness of their failings. They use the people in the world they contact as a yard stick to meausure their own sucess or lack thereof. I skimmed an article in a magazine about women brushing off compliments because they don't want other women to be jealous or feel bad compared to their own accomplishments. The article argued it to be a method of sparing people's feelings. I argue it to be lies brought on by the effect other people's complexes have on the person who is doing well. Because these little comments and enqiries on how you could be so talented or how long it takes you to do something aren't simply verbal mentions or interested questions, they are challenges. 'did you make that' is 'I couldn't make that, so how come you can'; 'where do you get the time to do all this stuff' is 'I am too lazy to make time to do this stuff so I don't think it's fair that you do make the time'; their questions are ways of shaming ability and success and creation. I'm fed up of feeling as though I should hide my accomplishments. And actually, I put a lot of effort into doing the things I do because I believe laziness to be an ugly quality in a person and I demand more of myself. People talk about living life while you still can, yet my version of this somehow seems to fail. It's ok to live your life by undertaking back packing tours of unappealling Eastern European countries and to go skydiving for charity but to live your life by being quietly successful, aiming to be good at the little things before the big? That can't be stomached.

Jealousy is an ugly quality and people try to hide it. They manage it from most because nobody looks deeper than the facade. People are too confused and their intelligences repressed too far to consider the awful realities of social interaction. I get hurt by social situations far easier than others not because I am soft or tender to such but because I am able read the subtle inaccuracies and flickering changes of characters others don't bother to. So when you next see me and you put on your impressed and unbelieving exterior to something I have spent a lot of time doing, don't think that I can't see the envy and the mild hatred bubbling underneath. Your sense of failure is your own and you can't hide it half as well as you think.